


Holographic Blue

by sparklight



Category: Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 20:33:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4493742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparklight/pseuds/sparklight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few days after the catastrophe on Bespin and before he's gotten his new hand, Luke tries to understand - his father, his parents, the changes between then and now. Artoo helps as well as he can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holographic Blue

**Author's Note:**

> One of those "one or both of the twins see the wedding holo Artoo must, of course, have" fics.

Covers pulled around him, pillows spread on the floor where they'd fallen and breath harsh in his ears, Luke tried to breathe. 

Tried to go through the exercises Yoda had taught him, but he couldn't even calm down at the moment, even less meditate. Left hand clutched tight over the protective cap that covered the stump his right arm ended in, Luke swallowed down bile and leaned forward as far as he could, curling up while still sitting down.

He _couldn't_ breathe.

Another two days until the prosthetic would be finished, but he didn't really care about that. He wished Leia was here, but while she _had been_ , she'd only just late yesterday left for _Home One_ for meetings with High Command. He'd assured her he'd be fine; he was out of critical and was recovering and he was _fine_.

Except he wasn't, and his breath burned in his throat as he took each quick, shallow breath in, unable to deepen them and still clutched his stump.

Twoonebee had told him there might be phantom pains and had assured him that was entirely normal.

There were no phantom pains.

There was _nothing_ ; as if the lightsaber had cauterized the connection with the Force in his arm when it'd cauterized the wound it'd left behind after his hand went flying. He realised, for the first time, how much he was actually aware of his body through the Force. 

It shouldn't be a surprise, not really. He'd only begun to be aware of himself - of his sense - in that way just a few weeks ago, but now, with the _lack_ of the hand like there just _shouldn't_ be anything there despite what his brain was telling him, it was starkly clear.

He couldn't breathe.

Screwing his eyes closed, Luke quickly snapped them back open, staring into the shadowed darkness of the room instead, which wasn't completely pitch black, mostly thanks to Artoo's lights. Better that than the darkness behind his eyelids, which seemed to pulse with the red light from Cloud City's innards.

The room was just the room, the darkness just the normal, soft shadows of an unlit room, not the darkness his... Vader--- that had emanated from his opponent.

His opponent.

"I don't---" his breath hitched and voice broke and he tried again to breathe, managed a quick, vicious breath and breathed it out in staggered sharpness. Took another while Artoo whistled softly, barely loud enough to be heard and shook his head. 

"I don't _understand_ , Artoo."

There was a pressure on his lungs and his chest that had nothing to do with Luke pressing his right arm against it, not quite hugging himself. Artoo trilled again, a quiet, softly inquisitive noise, and then pressed himself slightly closer. The round metal against his side was grounding, and Luke dared to close his eyes, just for a short moment.

He'd thought he could keep it to himself. He knew he _couldn't_ tell Leia, not with what had happened to her at Vader's hands, and telling the Rouges was out of the question as well. Han wasn't here to tell. So he'd tried to keep it to himself, keeping the words trapped, burning, in his mind, on his tongue, until it all came spilling out to Artoo when he'd woken up an hour earlier.

"I don't understand... Ben said he was a good pilot, a warrior, a _good friend_ ," his voice broke again, somewhere in the middle of that, but he forged on, ignoring how the plastic of the medical cap dug into the palm of his left hand. The hand that both brain and Force agreed was still there, compared to the other one.

"And other people... they've said as much too." That was mostly tales of what they'd heard or seen, not anyone personally knowing Anakin Skywalker, but in the end it was (had been) good enough for Luke. And now...

"Are they lying? And if they _aren't_ , how did he... how did he turn into _that_?"

Luke wanted to be angry, to feel it burning through his veins and in his lungs like his breath did, but he'd barrelled through that on the _Falcon_ on the way back to the fleet, and being angry wouldn't help him understand.

Or would it?

He shook his head and tried to breathe through his nose; in, out, a familiar rhythm that ought to be simple but wasn't.

"And what about... my mother? What did _she_ see? Or was she just---" He couldn't finish either the sentence or the thought, because he'd always thought that his parents (must have) had loved each other dearly, but what if that just wasn't _true_? There were any number of ways for a child to be conceived, and most of them had absolutely nothing to do with love.

And he had, probably with his usual naïvety, even when he knew very well of all those other options, simply assumed---

Artoo whistled sharply, waggling from side-to-side which meant he jostled Luke. Straightening up against his will and glowering at the astromech, Luke huffed.

" _What_ , Artoo?" He was probably being unfairly short with his friend, but his lungs felt tight and his... Vader's... the declaration was still ringing through his head and he was afraid that every time it echoed it'd bring back words that _weren't_ an echo. 

Artoo, however, was being patient, and with another soft whistle, his holo-projector lit up and painted the room in soft, cool blues. The image was a scene outside, Luke thought; something with a railing to the right, an old man in the back. He wasn't the focus, however. The focus was the two people in front, still a short distance away from the recorder - Artoo, obviously.

Luke's breath froze in his lungs as he stared, unconsciously worrying the cap on his stump.

The two young people were holding hands, he thought. The angle made it somewhat difficult to tell, but he was pretty sure of it. The woman was in a simple, yet elaborately lacy white gown, with a veil covering her hair. The man---

His breathing suddenly started again with a sharply drawn-in breath, because while they certainly weren't mirrors of each other, the other man had more than one feature that reminded Luke of _himself_. The scene suddenly froze and the background dropped away in favour of the view of the couple turning around slightly and zooming in.

This way he could see both their faces more clearly, and the quietly intent, _adoring_ expressions on both their faces made the cold claw in his stomach dissolve even as a lump got stuck in his throat.

His parents' marriage ceremony, he supposed. He was looking at their _wedding_. That much was clear, even if it didn't look like what he was used to when it came to weddings. 

"... he looks so _young_ , Artoo," Luke murmured past the lump in his throat, the warm, trembling one that called up memories of staring at the setting suns and wondering what his parents looked like, if he looked like his father... "they _both_ do."

Even staring right at his mother's face and noting, quietly dazed, that he had her nose, he couldn't remember anything of her. He _wished_ he could, but maybe it didn't matter. He wished he could ask someone else. 

He should've asked Ben...

Artoo whistled softly and was once again leaning his weight slightly into Luke, who drew himself up against the bed and leaned against Artoo in turn. Looking from his mother's soft face (though she had a pretty strong chin, even if he could easily tell he'd gotten his chin from his father) to his father's, those blue eyes as soft as his mother's face and eyes as well.

The love on display was unmistakeable, and Luke swallowed against the lump, feeling both a sucking despair coming from the incomprehension of how his father could've gone from this to the terrible darkness he was today, and a distinct feeling of quiet relief. In this, Ben hadn't lied. In this, the stories he'd been told from people who'd known of or briefly met his father were all true, in some small way.

His father had once been a normal man. Someone who loved. Which he _had_ known from the stories, but _seeing_ it was far different.

Staring at the holo with the room washed in the blues of the display projected onto the small space of floor between bed and wall, Luke dimly realised he'd been thinking of him as his father (again). He still wanted, _needed_ to ask if it was true, if Yoda knew it was true or not. He just wanted an outside confirmation or denial, even if he knew, from the way the Force reverberated along that rumbling proclamation as it echoed through his mind and ears, that it was.

But he still needed it.

For the moment, though, in the blue-lit darkness of the room, Luke found he could breathe again.

"Do you have any other holos?" Luke asked quietly and was happy he'd given in to the need to tell _someone_ what Vader had revealed.

Artoo had not just been here when the need came up, but had apparently been the right choice in more than one way. He'd ask him later how he had these holos and what he knew, but for now...

Luke smiled as Artoo chirped confirmation and the holo changed.


End file.
